Mostly you are right, But someone is producing all that milk. And that is enormous agricultural feed lot operations - part of which are family owned corporations, but not the common notion of "family farms". And yes, they are subsidized.
At this stage of (post) industrial economic development "poor family farmers" do not exist. The last of them went extinct in the 1960s and were gone by 1970 (that's 50 years ago folks). Most people do not appreciate the real nature of American farming today. There are fewer than 400,000 farm operators (one in 800 Americans) that turn out 90% of all U.S. economic farm value and these people are operating huge industrial farming operations. There are quite a few who are family owned still, but that means they are privately owned farming corporations with multiple family owners often quite removed from the actual farm.
The total number of farmers listed by the census is 2 million, but 75% of them are tiny and mostly lose money. Every one of these "famers" holds down a full-time job somewhere else to support themselves. This group has a high turn over rate, people entering and leaving the practice of small farming. To qualify as a farmer on the census all you have to do is produce $5,000 of gross product value (even if you sell none of it) each year, and declare yourself a farmer on a census form. And no one checks for the self-declared farm output.
Ok so they approved a plan. Wake me when they actually have a well functioning mass transit system that actually causes a reduction in the number of cars needed. I'll be especially impressed if they actually do it on time and under budget.
Naah. You'll be happier in your slumber.
The LA metro system is well functioning (I use it to commute to work, and I use it any time I go downtown - I would never drive there any more).
And by definition when people from the suburbs take the metro they aren't driving. So, yeah, it does cause a reduction in the number of cars on the freeways and surface streets.
I know, I know. You'll be now be setting new, higher bars you demand to be cleared for your satisfaction.
Do you have any actual facts to support your thoughts and "probablys"? Especially since your "probably already past that point now" would mean that there would be actual evidence now of renewables somehow increasing fossil fuel consumption. You "think" its true? Find and post some checkable data.
Currently the EU gets 17% of its electricity from renewables and even real skeptics (using and analyzing data) are not claiming that a renewable "grid apocalypse" until it hits about 30%.
Punishing people by death, and even less extreme forms of social coercion, are not people being converted due to their "looking into it" (i.e. making an informed decision after examining the doctrinal claims),
Reading comprehension and logic - you should look into it.
Advertisers get that. But it is not like you were watching with rapt attention when the pre-programmed ads interrupted the show. You were mostly doing other things, probably even had some "stuff to do" at hand, if you weren't hitting the head, or in the kitchen for something.
They knew that also, and planned for the reduced exposure. After all, often only one person is pausing and other viewers remain. Often you can hear the ad, and see part of it as you enter and leave. Advertising depends on repeat viewing, even partial repeats help. If it leads to more viewers on Hulu then advertisers won't complain.
Yes, the inherent problem with a phone-camera (not a camera-phone). It is primarily a phone, not a camera. You don't want the device to end up like in Spy Kids 3 bit with Machete's multi-function watch that no longer tells time (something had to go). Or... maybe we do...
I disagree. Falcon Heavy can loft two third's as much into orbit as a Saturn V. A Falcon Heavy is more than an order of magnitude less expensive in today's dollars than a Saturn V. It is also important to note that the Falcon Heavy will likely be a brief stepping stone to the much more capable BFR.
We've not seen the results of these drastically lower costs and faster launch turnarounds in the market yet, but we will. Soon.
In an apples-to-apples comparison is looks like the Falcon Heavy, once it flies, will be able to lift less than half what the Saturn V could lift:. 64 tonnes vs 140 tonnes.
But more importantly tech nerds have a fixation on LAUNCH COSTS!!!, as being the great obstacle in all space flight, when it is space flight hardware itself that dominates the cost of nearly all missions. The Mars Science Laboratory mission, of which Curiosity was part cost $2.5 billion, but the Atlas V launcher only cost $109 million, or 4.4% of the mission cost. A free launcher would have made virtually no difference in the cost of the mission. This is typical of space missions.
Additionally appealing the cost per kilogram of the largest launchers does little for typical missions that do not need that enormous payload. And no, you can't cram everything that needs to go into space into one humongous launch of dozens of different payloads. That could work occasionally, but they often require different orbits and launch schedules.
I seem to recall a buddy of Zuckerberg's who loaned him what, 10 grand, when he was starting out? And Zuckerberg rewarded that nice little lifeline by maneuvering to cut him out of the business entirely, forcing him to sue to get some (relative) crumbs.
Give an aggressive entrepreneur a leg up, and he will likely try to hold your head underwater.
Much of Israel is mountainous, so I'm not sure if that affects range in any very meaningful ways (but I suspect it does). But yeah, if you drive from Katsrin in the Golan to Eilat, it's under 500 km.
Other countries would describe it as "hilly". Although there is an extreme at Mount Hermon at 2230 m (no one drives to it, it is on the Syrian border), the highest elevations found in the country are about 750 m, which is where Jerusalem is located, and marks the summit where much driving will be done. If you are living in the Greater Jerusalem area you are driving around on a plateau with much smaller elevation changes (200 m or less), but the large majority of Israeli driving is on the coastal plain, and usually passes to go elsewhere in the country do not take you over 500 m. About the only time you would see regular elevation changes as large as 750 m is driving up to Jerusalem and down again.
Similar elevation changes in Southern California, where I drive a Prius have no overall impact on mileage. None. You worse mileage going uphill, better going down, it evens out. The effects of traffic (braking) erase any ability to see an elevation difference.
This move, in the 2018-2030 time frame is not intended to eliminate CO2 emissions from motor vehicles in Israel (though in the longer run it is absolutely the path to get there).
You need to look at Israel's plans for providing electricity in 2030 also. At that point their power will be 80% natural gas, 20% renewables (they are eliminating their use of coal entirely). Natural gas is a fossil fuel, but in a combined cycle plant it drastically reduces CO2 emissions compared to ICE vehicles (see below) to only 38% of the present emissions, so yes it moves the ball way forward.
The overall energy efficiency of EVs powered by fossil fuels is barely better than ICE vehicles
Now you are just making yourself look like a fool. The efficiency of natural gas combined cycle plants is expected to hit 65% in the next decade (i.e. before 2030), whereas ICE vehicles are limited to about 21% efficiency. Throw in a generous 5% transmission loss (small country, short transmission distances), and a 90% charge to wheel efficiency for 2030 era EVs, and you still have an overall efficiency of 55%. "Barely better", sheesh.
Solar energy is very inefficient and the mining of the necessary rare earths for the panels and batteries produces sizeable amounts of CO2, along with deadly toxins and radioactive waste.
No rare earths in solar panels, or in any battery technology considered for grid scale. No radioactive waste being produced. No "deadly toxins" that cannot be destroyed (and in fact generally are eliminated in modern plants". And no, it is not CO2 negative, even if dirty energy is used to manufacture.
Fusion power plants however use a lot of rate exotic materials, and their very high capital cost means lots of CO2 before they start operating. Odd that you don;t think that counts against them.
Try supporting your claims here with some citations, or at least specific claims rather than "October 2013, fusion scientists in Europe reached break-even. Ok, not quite a decade. 2014, the U.S. exceeds break-even." without specifying the project or making any checkable claim.
That is a face saving way of explaining it, but actually it underperformed its claimed performance by an order of magnitude, despite all the work that had been done with smaller systems to inprove the LASNEX code used for modelling. It was expected to be a fact of 3 above breakeven, but was a factor of three below.
Now the driver system selected was utterly useless for demonstrating a power reactor, unlike tokamaks generally. The stadium size laser can only fire about one shot a day, instead of 100 shots per second required for a power plant, with no way of improving that firing rate. An entirely different technology would be needed for that. But at least NIF shows that the required power is about 10 times what they thought would be necessary. That is a step forward, but it shows that the whole concept of ICF is shakier that thought before.
Also I tend to believe with some older critics that a tokamak will never be commercially viable:
I support the ITER project but I absolutely believe (because of the estimates made by ITER proponents) that it will never be commercially viable. We won't get grid power from fusion in this century. But proving that we cab use fusion to produce energy, even if at a high cost, is still a worthwhile project. Not every part of the solar system has lots of solar power and wind.
Expensive fusion power will have little effect at all. At this point while people would like to think fusion power will eventually be cheap we really don't know what a real fusion power plant will cost. It might be cheap, but it might not. We don't know enough about the technology involved to make that determination.
You could make the argument that we don't know enough about the technology to know for certain that a practical fusion power plant is possible, regardless of cost (but it isn't a strong argument at this point). But you can't make a credible argument that we know so little that is might be cheap. Absolutely it won't all those exotic materials, giant superconducting coils, hugely elaborate monitoring and high power control systems ain't going to be cheap no matter what. All estimates of the ITER follow-on (assuming everything goes as expected) put the cost of 10 times the wholesale cost of electricity, which has remained stable (adjusting for inflation) for 60 years.
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Mostly you are right, But someone is producing all that milk. And that is enormous agricultural feed lot operations - part of which are family owned corporations, but not the common notion of "family farms". And yes, they are subsidized.
At this stage of (post) industrial economic development "poor family farmers" do not exist. The last of them went extinct in the 1960s and were gone by 1970 (that's 50 years ago folks). Most people do not appreciate the real nature of American farming today. There are fewer than 400,000 farm operators (one in 800 Americans) that turn out 90% of all U.S. economic farm value and these people are operating huge industrial farming operations. There are quite a few who are family owned still, but that means they are privately owned farming corporations with multiple family owners often quite removed from the actual farm.
The total number of farmers listed by the census is 2 million, but 75% of them are tiny and mostly lose money. Every one of these "famers" holds down a full-time job somewhere else to support themselves. This group has a high turn over rate, people entering and leaving the practice of small farming. To qualify as a farmer on the census all you have to do is produce $5,000 of gross product value (even if you sell none of it) each year, and declare yourself a farmer on a census form. And no one checks for the self-declared farm output.
Ok so they approved a plan. Wake me when they actually have a well functioning mass transit system that actually causes a reduction in the number of cars needed. I'll be especially impressed if they actually do it on time and under budget.
Naah. You'll be happier in your slumber.
The LA metro system is well functioning (I use it to commute to work, and I use it any time I go downtown - I would never drive there any more).
And by definition when people from the suburbs take the metro they aren't driving. So, yeah, it does cause a reduction in the number of cars on the freeways and surface streets.
I know, I know. You'll be now be setting new, higher bars you demand to be cleared for your satisfaction.
Do you have any actual facts to support your thoughts and "probablys"? Especially since your "probably already past that point now" would mean that there would be actual evidence now of renewables somehow increasing fossil fuel consumption. You "think" its true? Find and post some checkable data.
Currently the EU gets 17% of its electricity from renewables and even real skeptics (using and analyzing data) are not claiming that a renewable "grid apocalypse" until it hits about 30%.
Punishing people by death, and even less extreme forms of social coercion, are not people being converted due to their "looking into it" (i.e. making an informed decision after examining the doctrinal claims),
Reading comprehension and logic - you should look into it.
Cats killing birds at a rate 10,000 times higher than wind and solar power combined .
An entirely made-up quote. You cannot cite a source for this because it does not exist.
Yeah, I always find an anonymous coward citing no evidence at all so convincing...
Meaning now instead of just a "pause", I must now "pause and then mute"?
Don't be silly. You won't be able to mute these ads. /cynical-prediction
I don't think Hulu can control the volume of your computer or TV.
Advertisers get that. But it is not like you were watching with rapt attention when the pre-programmed ads interrupted the show. You were mostly doing other things, probably even had some "stuff to do" at hand, if you weren't hitting the head, or in the kitchen for something.
They knew that also, and planned for the reduced exposure. After all, often only one person is pausing and other viewers remain. Often you can hear the ad, and see part of it as you enter and leave. Advertising depends on repeat viewing, even partial repeats help. If it leads to more viewers on Hulu then advertisers won't complain.
Yes, the inherent problem with a phone-camera (not a camera-phone). It is primarily a phone, not a camera. You don't want the device to end up like in Spy Kids 3 bit with Machete's multi-function watch that no longer tells time (something had to go). Or... maybe we do...
I "moved my money" out of big banks (BOA to be specific) and just use a credit union. Better service, better rates, lower fees.
I disagree. Falcon Heavy can loft two third's as much into orbit as a Saturn V. A Falcon Heavy is more than an order of magnitude less expensive in today's dollars than a Saturn V. It is also important to note that the Falcon Heavy will likely be a brief stepping stone to the much more capable BFR.
We've not seen the results of these drastically lower costs and faster launch turnarounds in the market yet, but we will. Soon.
In an apples-to-apples comparison is looks like the Falcon Heavy, once it flies, will be able to lift less than half what the Saturn V could lift:. 64 tonnes vs 140 tonnes.
But more importantly tech nerds have a fixation on LAUNCH COSTS!!!, as being the great obstacle in all space flight, when it is space flight hardware itself that dominates the cost of nearly all missions. The Mars Science Laboratory mission, of which Curiosity was part cost $2.5 billion, but the Atlas V launcher only cost $109 million, or 4.4% of the mission cost. A free launcher would have made virtually no difference in the cost of the mission. This is typical of space missions.
Additionally appealing the cost per kilogram of the largest launchers does little for typical missions that do not need that enormous payload. And no, you can't cram everything that needs to go into space into one humongous launch of dozens of different payloads. That could work occasionally, but they often require different orbits and launch schedules.
I seem to recall a buddy of Zuckerberg's who loaned him what, 10 grand, when he was starting out? And Zuckerberg rewarded that nice little lifeline by maneuvering to cut him out of the business entirely, forcing him to sue to get some (relative) crumbs .
Give an aggressive entrepreneur a leg up, and he will likely try to hold your head underwater.
Much of Israel is mountainous, so I'm not sure if that affects range in any very meaningful ways (but I suspect it does). But yeah, if you drive from Katsrin in the Golan to Eilat, it's under 500 km.
Other countries would describe it as "hilly". Although there is an extreme at Mount Hermon at 2230 m (no one drives to it, it is on the Syrian border), the highest elevations found in the country are about 750 m, which is where Jerusalem is located, and marks the summit where much driving will be done. If you are living in the Greater Jerusalem area you are driving around on a plateau with much smaller elevation changes (200 m or less), but the large majority of Israeli driving is on the coastal plain, and usually passes to go elsewhere in the country do not take you over 500 m. About the only time you would see regular elevation changes as large as 750 m is driving up to Jerusalem and down again.
Similar elevation changes in Southern California, where I drive a Prius have no overall impact on mileage. None. You worse mileage going uphill, better going down, it evens out. The effects of traffic (braking) erase any ability to see an elevation difference.
Switching to EVs does very little good if 95% of your electricity generation is via fossil fuels. All you're doing is shifting the CO2 emissions from the tailpipe to the smokestack.
This move, in the 2018-2030 time frame is not intended to eliminate CO2 emissions from motor vehicles in Israel (though in the longer run it is absolutely the path to get there).
You need to look at Israel's plans for providing electricity in 2030 also. At that point their power will be 80% natural gas, 20% renewables (they are eliminating their use of coal entirely). Natural gas is a fossil fuel, but in a combined cycle plant it drastically reduces CO2 emissions compared to ICE vehicles (see below) to only 38% of the present emissions, so yes it moves the ball way forward.
The overall energy efficiency of EVs powered by fossil fuels is barely better than ICE vehicles
Now you are just making yourself look like a fool. The efficiency of natural gas combined cycle plants is expected to hit 65% in the next decade (i.e. before 2030), whereas ICE vehicles are limited to about 21% efficiency. Throw in a generous 5% transmission loss (small country, short transmission distances), and a 90% charge to wheel efficiency for 2030 era EVs, and you still have an overall efficiency of 55%. "Barely better", sheesh.
Another believer that a smoking wasteland outside of the gated communities is the natural and inevitable order of things.
"Gummint only does bad things with money..."
They aren't treating you like you are black.
So they are, but you just take it for granted.
The rich are just like you, but at a higher level of privilege.
Solar energy is very inefficient and the mining of the necessary rare earths for the panels and batteries produces sizeable amounts of CO2, along with deadly toxins and radioactive waste.
No rare earths in solar panels, or in any battery technology considered for grid scale. No radioactive waste being produced. No "deadly toxins" that cannot be destroyed (and in fact generally are eliminated in modern plants". And no, it is not CO2 negative, even if dirty energy is used to manufacture.
Fusion power plants however use a lot of rate exotic materials, and their very high capital cost means lots of CO2 before they start operating. Odd that you don;t think that counts against them.
Try supporting your claims here with some citations, or at least specific claims rather than "October 2013, fusion scientists in Europe reached break-even. Ok, not quite a decade. 2014, the U.S. exceeds break-even." without specifying the project or making any checkable claim.
Link us to the research paper that supports your conclusion then. The "unreliable" Wikipedia provides links to research papers on this. The ITER team itself believes the record is 0.67 and is held by JET.
That is a face saving way of explaining it, but actually it underperformed its claimed performance by an order of magnitude, despite all the work that had been done with smaller systems to inprove the LASNEX code used for modelling. It was expected to be a fact of 3 above breakeven, but was a factor of three below.
Now the driver system selected was utterly useless for demonstrating a power reactor, unlike tokamaks generally. The stadium size laser can only fire about one shot a day, instead of 100 shots per second required for a power plant, with no way of improving that firing rate. An entirely different technology would be needed for that. But at least NIF shows that the required power is about 10 times what they thought would be necessary. That is a step forward, but it shows that the whole concept of ICF is shakier that thought before.
Also I tend to believe with some older critics that a tokamak will never be commercially viable:
I support the ITER project but I absolutely believe (because of the estimates made by ITER proponents) that it will never be commercially viable. We won't get grid power from fusion in this century. But proving that we cab use fusion to produce energy, even if at a high cost, is still a worthwhile project. Not every part of the solar system has lots of solar power and wind.
Expensive fusion power will have little effect at all. At this point while people would like to think fusion power will eventually be cheap we really don't know what a real fusion power plant will cost. It might be cheap, but it might not. We don't know enough about the technology involved to make that determination.
You could make the argument that we don't know enough about the technology to know for certain that a practical fusion power plant is possible, regardless of cost (but it isn't a strong argument at this point). But you can't make a credible argument that we know so little that is might be cheap. Absolutely it won't all those exotic materials, giant superconducting coils, hugely elaborate monitoring and high power control systems ain't going to be cheap no matter what. All estimates of the ITER follow-on (assuming everything goes as expected) put the cost of 10 times the wholesale cost of electricity, which has remained stable (adjusting for inflation) for 60 years.
But no substantiation of the claim was offered, and no evidence that it is true exists as far as I can find.